


Nothing Ever Ends

by MontagueBitch (porcia_catonis)



Category: Ancient History RPF, Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Noir, F/M, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 15:35:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12585040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/porcia_catonis/pseuds/MontagueBitch
Summary: Set in an ambiguous 30s/40s vibe.  Private Detective Porcia Catonis agreed to help a man uncover the secrets of a politician he believed to have plans he couldn’t abide by.  Months later, she helped her husband and client kill the president.  As they convince the secret service to keep the deed covered up,  it seems they’re through with the matter.  The deceased has other ideas.





	Nothing Ever Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a little Halloween drabble with a nice noir vibe, just ghost-flavored fun for my RPC friends.

The record slowed, and let out a dying little croon as it reached its end.  A telltale scratch bid Cassius go to it, then reset it.  Anything was better than leaving the air empty and their minds open.  Mark Antony’s glass of wine swirled in his hand.  Red, and thick, it threatened to rise out of the glass, to meet the table cloth, leaving the crystal empty and the white ever changed.  It made her think of blood, made her grateful she had worn black the day she spilled it.  Antony caught himself, and downed the rest.  It was his third, and the bottle was growing scant.

They owed it to him, anyway.  Brutus shifts at her side, and for the first time in half an hour, he lets go of her hand beneath the table.  Instinct bids her to move one ankle to touch his, as if their touch might let them pass strength from one body to the other, sharing forces.  His hands clasp one another on the table, and finally, he looks Antony in the eye.  They have been magnets all this evening, dancing an opposing ends, as far as possible from one another.  

“Have we reached an agreement, Mr. Antony?”

A clap of glass against wood resounds as Antony abandons his drained cup.  “We’re agreed.”  It’s only now that she notices the circles under his eyes, the tremor in his hands, the extra shadow of a beard he hasn’t cared to share.  “Don’t be mistaken, Mr. Brutus.  I don’t like this, and I don’t trust you.  But circumstances being what they are--when I leave tonight, this is over, and as far as the CIA is concerned, the president died in a burglary gone horribly wrong--negligent guards under investigation.”

As Porcia breathed a sigh of relief, she noticed Cassius out of the corner of her eye, leaning in the doorway, not daring to get too close to Antony, rising from his chair.  A lit cigarette rested between his lips.  

“Thank you.  You’ve done a noble thing.  It’s what’s right, in the end.”  Brutus offered a slender hand, and Antony’s took it.  Where it had been shaking moments before, it was all stiffness now.  Porcia offered her own, and received the same.  

“I’ll be going.”  Antony grabbed his hat, and he was headed to the coat room when the house went dark.

There was no crash of thunder, no telltale zapping, or flickering, but where one moment there had been the yellow glow of electricity, they were bathed in darkness.  

“Damn it,” Brutus hissed at her side, and she heard him rise.  On a new moon, with the curtains drawn, they had been blinded.  “This place is falling apart.”  It had become a habit of his, of late, to reflect on how old this building he had been born in was, often in awe, and now to curse.  

“Check the fuse box, it’s got to be fixable.”  Cassius was invisible, identifiable by his voice alone, and the little circle of orange at the end of his cigarette.

“I’ll get it,”  Porcia stood, and with one last squeeze to her husband’s shoulder, she was headed towards the door, only to find that it had locked from the inside.  

“It wont--”  She never finished that thought.  Where darkness consumed, suddenly they were blinded just as much by light.  White and without heat, it flashed and filled the room.  One moment nothing, the next everything.

It was the beginning of the world, or the drop of the H-bomb, the end of the world as we knew it.  Three flinching figures were left, blinking, as the room carried the eerie glow, now, of morning sun through fog, but by the fireplace, the glow concentrated, forming the figure of a man.  He stood as tall as Cassius, but broader.  His face was lined and serious, his suit was pressed, and his hairline was receding.  He, like the light, was colorless but for three gashes, one at his face, one on his leg, and his final at his neck.  Each of those was the same garish crimson they had last seen in March.

“’ _It’s what’s right, in the end_.’”  His voice was his own as he mocked what Brutus had so hopefully said, and if he weren’t Caesar before, she had no doubt once he had spoken.  But while his voice was his own, he was far away.  His body was ten feet from her, but his voice may as well have been in another room, overheard when it shouldn’t be.

Cassius was white as a sheet, Brutus took a step backward, pressing himself against the dining room table, too alarmed to go around it, and trapped between the ghost and the wall.  Porcia found herself edging ever closet to the kitchen, where she might, should this prove anything more solid than a shadow or a horrible dream, pierce his skin again.

“What’s going on?  Where have the lights gone?”  Antony scrambled in, only to stop next to Cassius. All his momentum melted into the air, and his jaw went slack. “ _You_ ,” it was nothing more than a whisper, but in the dim light, Porcia caught a glimmer in his eye she could swear looked almost like tears.  The phantom Caesar took no notice of him.

“Nothing ever ends, Brutus.”  And then he raised his gaze to each of the guilty ones.  “The three of you will learn that soon.”   

His gaze met Brutus first, then Cassius, whose cigarette held limp and lonely in his lips, and then Porcia.  With that, he smiled, and the red and white of his garish form mingled, as be became a pillar of pinkish light, then faded, and shrank.

“Caesar--”  Antony choked out his name, and a hand extended, but by the time he had taken so much as a step, Caesar was gone, and the light had returned.  She could see, with the light back, that he wasn’t crying, not really.  Only one tear had escaped to streamline down his face before he’d forced them to stay within his eyes.

Four people stood, silent and stunned in the wake of someone arguably not present, none of them looking at one another.  the bottle of wine had been knocked over between the darkness and the fear, and red dripped from the wretched table cloth to the wood of the floor, and no one could bring themselves to stop it.

**Author's Note:**

> Comment if you liked this, and I may write some more of private eye!Porcia, investigative journalist!Cassius and attorney general!Brutus, perhaps leading up to, or after the killing.  
> Anyway, thanks for reading my silly ghost fic feat. shameless watchmen reference.


End file.
